Apple is to Computers as BMW is to Cars? Wrong

"Steve Jobs loves to throw out the handy little statistic that Apple has more marketshare than BMW in an effort to justify the Mac's 3% of the US computer market.

"There is one fundamental flaw in his thinking, however.

"Whether one drives a BMW or a Chevy, one uses the same fuel. However, if you use a Mac, you need software that is incompatible with 97% of the computer market.

"Imagine if BMWs required special fuel. How many people would buy them?"

And, having worked in corporations and watched Macs being "cleansed" out from them, I can contribute a few more examples why that analogy fails. So Steve Jobs ought to think different, himself.

For example, you may laugh at the PCs being Yugos but the IT department could build the equivalent of roads with widths that only the Yuogos can run on. And they will do it just because they can.

The Internet has, sort of, saved the Mac. Back in the days when corporations were evaluating mail systems with names like Da Vinci and Network Courier (names you may not have heard of today because they probably all died with the advent of the Internet), it was very easy for IT departments to kill the Macs by choosing just one out of the many that would not support the Mac.

Java has also saved the Mac. It was possible, before we had the abundance of JDBC drivers that came with Java, to say that none of the standard database systems will work with the Mac. So, off with it. But today - Oracle, MySQL, PostgresSQL, Sybase - all these will work on the Mac.